Patent Gridlock is Blocking Developing Lifesaving Drugs
Posted on August 25, 2008 Comments (1)
How patent gridlock is blocking the development of lifesaving drugs by Michael Heller, Forbes
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Nicholas Naclerio, who used to head the BioChip Division at Motorola , told Scientific American, “If we want to make a medical diagnostic with 40 genes on it, and 20 companies hold patents on those genes, we may have a big problem.”
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And it’s not just drugs we’re losing. Today anything high tech–banking, semiconductors, software, telecom–demands the assembly of innumerable patents. Innovation has moved on, but we’re stuck with old-style ownership that’s easy to fragment and hard to put together. This debacle’s only upside is that assembling fragmented property is one of the great entrepreneurial and political opportunities of our era.
This is a critical problem I have written about before. The broken patent system is a serious problem that needs to be fixed.
Related: The Effects of Patenting on Science – Patent Policy Harming USA, and the world – Patenting Life is a Bad Idea – The Differences Between Culture and Code – Innovation and Creative Commons – The Value of the Public Domain – The Patent System Needs to be Significantly Improved – Are Software Patents Evil?
Tags: government,Health Care,innovation,medical research,regulation
Backyard Wildlife: Great Spreadwing Damselfly
Posted on August 24, 2008 Comments (5)
If you know the what type of dragonfly is in the photo, please add a comment (update: a comment indicates it is not a dragonfly but a Great Spreadwing Archilestes grandis damselfly – I really enjoy getting feedback like this. It appears the most common way to differentiate the two is how the wings are at rest but the Spreadwing is an exception). I had a small preying mantis drop on my head, and then the ground, a month ago in my backyard. But when I got my digital camera I couldn’t find it again. The variety of insects you can see can be amazing, especially if you don’t use poisons and chemicals in your yard.
Photo by John Hunter, creative commons attribution license.
Related: Backyard Wildlife: Sharpshinned Hawk – Backyard Wildlife: Fox – posts on insects
Engineer Uses Gravity
Posted on August 23, 2008 Comments (2)
How do they do it?
Well, there’s a rope. There’s a pulley. And the rope and the pulley work a contraption made out of a pipe. The whole gizmo is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan by the name of Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago; if he were alive, he’d call it cutting edge. And there’s the beauty of it: It’s sophisticated, yes, but only because it’s simple.
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Garrett Brown revolutionized the movie business 38 years ago when he invented the Steadicam, a mechanical arm for cameramen that smooths away the jerkiness of hand-held shots. Much later, he came up with the Skycam, which rides a web of wires above the heads of football players. In between, Mr. Brown, 66 years old, got his one-line brief from NBC: “They wanted a camera,” he says, “that stayed with divers, including going underwater with them.”
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The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe’s full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass. From the diving platform to the water line, the glass is smoky. Below the line, it’s clear, so the camera need not adjust its exposure as it streaks into underwater darkness.
The pipe is caulked. The camera drops through air. “It doesn’t splash into the water,” Mr. Brown said. “That would look horrible.”
The appropriate use of technology is great to see. Applying knowledge well is a key to good engineering.
Related: Using Cameras Monitoring To Aid Conservation Efforts – How Do Wii Game Controllers Work? – Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg? – Awesome Cat Cam
Very Long-Term Backup
Posted on August 22, 2008 Comments (0)
Very Long-Term Backup by Kevin Kelly
This business side of the disk is pure nickel. Picking it up you would not be aware there were 13,500 pages of linguistic gold hiding on it. The nickel is deposited on an etched silicon disk. In effect the Rosetta disk is a nickel cast of a micro-etch silicon mold. When the disk is held at the right angle the grid array of the pages form a slight diffraction rainbow. You need a 750-power optical microscope to read the pages.
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The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog “human-readable” scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on. Some of the key indexing meta-data for each language section (such as the standard linguistic code number for that language) are displayed in a machine-readable font (OCRb) so that a smart microscope could guide you through this analog trove.
Our hope is that at least one of the eight headline languages can be recovered in 1,000 years. But even without reading, a person might guess there are small things to see in this disk.
This is another project of an organization I like very much: The Long Now Foundation.
Related: The Future of Science – Engineering at Home – 1,000 True Fans
Treadmill Cats: Friday Cat Fun #3
Posted on August 22, 2008 Comments (2)
Have a nice day 
Updated to a new treadmill call video as the old one was removed.
Related: Friday Cat Fun #1 – Photos by Fritz the Cat – cat related posts – Treadmill Desks
Engineers Should Follow Their Hearts
Posted on August 21, 2008 Comments (5)
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder is a great engineer and full of wonderful quotes for engineers to take to heart. The autobiography of the Woz is certainly a good read for any engineer. Woz urges engineers to follow their hearts
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“Sometimes when you’re short of resources it forces you to do better work,” he said. To design the Apple’s logic circuitry, “I couldn’t afford an online timeshare computer system. I had to write down ones and zeros (and simulate the computer’s operations). It was all done by hand, never once on a computer.”
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He offered his computer designs to HP five times, but they never were interested. “I would not sell something for money without my employer getting a cut of it.”
Related: Interview of Steve Wozniak – Programmers at Work – The Woz Speaks – Curious Cat Science and Engineering books
Life in a bubble
Posted on August 21, 2008 Comments (0)
By virtue of their rough, water-repellent coat, when submerged these insects trap a thin layer of air on their bodies. These bubbles not only serve as a finite oxygen store, but also allow the insects to absorb oxygen from the surrounding water.
“Some insects have adapted to life underwater by using this bubble as an external lung,” said John Bush, associate professor of applied mathematics, a co-author of the recent study.
Thanks to those air bubbles, insects can stay below the surface indefinitely and dive as deep as about 30 meters, according to the study co-authored by Bush and Morris Flynn, former applied mathematics instructor. Some species, such as Neoplea striola, which are native to New England, hibernate underwater all winter long.
Related: Swimming Ants – Fish Discovery: Breathes Air for Months at a Time – Giant Star Fish and More in Antarctica
Autism and the MMR vaccine
Posted on August 20, 2008 Comments (1)
Science Tuesday: Back into the hornets nest is a thoughtful follow-up post on the decision of a scientist to vaccinate his child.
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If a particular trait’s heritability is 100% then the trait is due entirely to genetic variation, if the heritability is 0% then the trait is due entirely to environmental variation. By some estimates, heritability of autism spectrum disorders exceeds 90%
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repeated studies have found that autism diagnoses continue to rise even after the removal of thimerosal from the vaccine.
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Finally, when thinking about the environmental influences on autism, it’s important to explore the role of the environment on genetics. Many of the types of genetic changes that have been identified as causative in autism are indicative of some sort of DNA damage – DNA damage that may result from exposure to an environmental toxin. Many scientists, and I count myself in their number, feel that the recent autism ‘epidemic’ is due primarily to improved screening and diagnosis. In other words, prior to the 1980’s, many people suffering from autism were diagnosed as “slow” or misdiagnosed with another type of mental retardation. Unfortunately, there is no way to quantify this hypothesis.
This is one of the examples of what is so good about blogs. Great content that probably would not be available but through a blog.
Related: Scientists Reconsider Autism – Autism, Science and Politics – posts on vaccination
Tags: Health Care,Life Science,scientists,vaccine
Google.org Invests $10 million in Geothermal Energy
Posted on August 19, 2008 Comments (3)
Google is investing huge sums in renewable energy with the aim of cheaper than coal renewable energy. Google.org (the philanthropic arm of Google) announced $10.25 million in investments in a breakthrough energy technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS).
EGS expands the potential of geothermal energy by orders of magnitude. The traditional geothermal approach relies on finding naturally occurring pockets of steam and hot water. The EGS process, by comparison, replicates these conditions by fracturing hot rock, circulating water through the system, and using the resulting steam to produce electricity in a conventional turbine.
A recent MIT report on EGS estimates that just 2% of the heat below the continental United States between 3 and 10 kilometers, depths within the range of current drilling technology, is more than 2,500 times the country’s total annual energy use.
“EGS could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world. It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind,” said Dan Reicher, Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org.
Google’s Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative focuses on solar thermal power, advanced wind, EGS and other potential breakthrough technologies. Google has set a goal to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity, enough to power a city the size of San Francisco, in years, not decades.
Read more
Huge Ant Nest
Posted on August 19, 2008 Comments (1)
Very cool webcast. The ant nest covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. The nest is engineered with vents to promote the flow of air, bringing in fresh air and expelling carbon dioxide created by the large fungus gardens. The scientists filled the ant next with concrete to excavate it: 10 tons of concrete were needed.
Related: Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria – Ants on Stilts for Science – Giant Nests of Yellow-jackets
Tags: animals,ants,cool,Engineering,insects,webcasts
Using Spice-based Compound To Kill Cancer Cells
Posted on August 19, 2008 Comments (2)
Synthetic molecules, derived from curcumin, a naturally occurring compound found in the spice turmeric have been killed cancer cells, in lab settings. Centuries of anecdotal evidence and recent scientific research suggest curcumin has multiple disease-fighting features, including anti-tumor properties. However, when eaten, curcumin is not absorbed well by the body. Instead, most ingested curcumin in food or supplement form remains in the gastrointestinal system and is eliminated before it is able to enter the bloodstream or tissues.
James Fuchs, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at Ohio State University and principal investigator on the project, and colleagues are continuing to refine compounds that are best structured to interact with a few overactive proteins that are associated with cell activity in breast and prostate cancers. Blocking these molecular targets can initiate cell death or stop cell migration in the cancers.
A major component of their strategy is called structure-based, computer-aided design, a relatively new technology in the drug discovery field. Before ever working with an actual compound, the scientists can make manipulations to computer-designed molecules and observe simulated interactions between molecules and proteins to predict which structural changes will make the most sense to pursue.
“Most of the interaction between our compound and the overactive protein comes from what are called hot spots on the protein’s surface,” said Chenglong Li, assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at Ohio State and an expert in computational chemistry. “For each spot, we can design small chemical fragments and link them together to make a molecule. This is what computer-aided design and modeling can do.”
Some of the most effective compounds have been tested for their effectiveness against human cancer cell lines – as well as whether they might be toxic to healthy cells. So far, the molecule favored by the researchers has a nearly 100-fold difference in toxicity to cancer cells vs. healthy cells, meaning it takes 100 times more of the compound to kill a healthy cell than it does to kill a cancer cell.
Related: Full Press Release from Ohio State University – Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees – Cancer Deaths, Declining Trend – Cancer Cure, Not so Fast – Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education
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